way to go abolishing juries, for observing ECHR and qualifying for EU

The last possible way for the SNP govt to convimce anyone they want Scotland to be a progressive EU member complying with human rights, ECHR being part of EU law, is to abolish juries. Let alone, to do it exactly when it looks like done in reaction to not liking what a jury did, not getting it to do the dirty against Salmond.

"PLANS FOR RAPE SUSPECTS IN SCOTLAND TO FACE TRIAL WITHOUT JURY" - Times headline, Mar 18. (Times links are paywalled but the headline suffices,) Plans to put half the population under politically abusable arbitrary authority including in deciding serious crime guilt on one word against another. That is exactly the type of arbitrary authority culture that Salmond said in the recent scandal hearings, makes Scotland's polity not ready for independence.

In reaction to him saying that: instead of moving to fix it they are escalating, militantly making it much worse. Abolishing the safeguard that cleared Salmond's name, and straight after it did. Openly going for the arbitrary judicial authority that could have been used to jail him at plotters' convenience and for a discriminatory reign of terror against men with guilt in accusation, and decided on by one person who will be part of the state's political elite.

Too many keen to buy indy as the new standard lefties' dream, have chosen to forget how the SNP govt attempted, at the pandemic's start a year ago, to abolish jury trials for its duration. Now it clearly hopes for the PC gender prejudice around this area of crime to override the concern that reasoning voters should have: for jury trials and presumption of innocence, and for how it is never safe to take just conflicting words, one or several against another, as evidence of guilt. Evidence is measurable verifiable facts. Competing words never are that.

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grim purist racism becoming clearer step by step.

Very unpleasant racially excluding themes are now emerging consistently, if you look out for them, in the Yes campaign and case. It is a particularly tragic turn in the history of a dispersed people historically subjected to worldwide clearances. despite the plan to have a Homecoming Festival this summer, present day nationalism is showing selfish forms only caring about the home population and betraying the diaspora. If it stays this way, everyone with family links to the rest of Britain, or with friends who have family links to the rest of Britain, will have strong humanitarian need to vote No.

I have mentioned before getting ignored by every part of the Yes campaign enquired to to establish that our new state will not have a power to say no to any of the applications to "register" for citizenship by descent, as the White Paper describes. To this you can now include Labour For Independence. The position is no longer left to assuming the worst from silence and from Yes newspaper number 2. On Mar 11 there was a Yes public meeting in Gorgie, Edinburgh. there, to my question on this, Alex Neil confirmed the worst, the answer not wanted. That yes the new state would hold onto a choice how to respond to the citizenship by descent applications. He offered as an excuse for this that it screens out undesirables like serious criminals. He made the usual noises about the Yes side wanting to encourage new population, but that can not take away that when pinned down in front of a public audience as to their position he has gave a position that would take away the automatic unobstructable access to their own country, that exists now under the Union, for Scots who were born in exile because their parents/grandparents moved away, and who already have the pain of not having been able to rush back to live here on independence day and qualify for automatic citizenship that way. To vote for that is to commit a new clearances, to divide families and effect a division of hate between Scots potentially closing our country to some of our own offspring. That is not national renewal or liberation, that is national betrayal and severely serious purist racism.

In that meeting there was no comeback to the answers given, so that the speakers could get away with evasions. So there was no comeback to ask him: how do we know you won't discriminate against the unemployed and the poor. Any time politicians are not tied down against doing that, you know as surely as clockwork it is what they will do. These are the same folks as inflicted Trump on Aberdeenshire against the locals' will and who are abolishing corroboration and tampering with free criminal defence, always remember that.

A letter in the Sunday Times, responding to the birthplace racism in the legal challenge for expats to have the vote, pinpointed exactly what is involved in these attitudes. Written from England by Andrew Lockhart, it said "There are many people born in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or abroad who, for ancestral reasons, have emotional ties with Scotland and deem themselves Scots. That does not mean they would wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state..." and "Alex Salmond should not assume that even those born in Scotland and who live elsewhere would wish to accept what he so condescendingly offers." It now seems to be the No supporters who are conscious of these ties. Alternatively they might well wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state if one is created, and stronger practical factors than just ancestry and emotion are at stake, family ties and background, when your status is made different even than your siblings' and the rest of your family are all in the homeland whose government, claiming to be progressive, asks to be allowed to exclude its own.

You might say that no excluding will happen because we will all still be in a common travel area. Even if that was true it would only hold for those of the offspring born in exile who live in the rest of Britain or the EU. But as we rationally know, there are considerably big chances that common travel areas will break down, through either country ending up outside the EU or through England fulfilling its threat to put a border onto us. If those situations happen, citizenship does translate into being allowed to live here at all.

Then yesterday I attended a lecture in Glasgow by a Yes campaign leading name, supposed to be a lefty one into popular participation. In the informal time after the lecture I asked him what ordinary people should do to make the Yes campaign take a position guaranteeing the children of exile their safe belonging here and citizenship. What I got back was a volley of disgustingly hard man conservative attitudes about folks who live here and pay their taxes here, something about a standard process for citizenship taking 3 years! that is not even in the White Paper, and no promises or straight answer at all for anyone not already living here to live here if free movement breaks down. He actively said he would speak up and say this is wrong, if citizenship was being opened up any further to diaspora who do not already live here. By this he showed a very dark racism, only further confirming the seriousness of these concerns against voting Yes on present terms. He seriously imagined himself in the lecture a progressive calling for our news state to do lots of left wing things, and disturbingly undemocratically he called for it to be governed by a left wing consensual partnership between the major parties instead of a proper party contest, that was sinister too. yet he has no feeling or consciousness for the diaspora at all, all his imagined empowerment of the nation applies only to the folks who already live here, that is all he sees the nation as. Narrow minded, sweepingly excluding and with mental walls up against the rest of the world and everyone in it including exiled Scots, this nastiness follows naturally on from, continues, the recent hating action of Angus Macneil MP who denied that the childen of exile are Scots if they have not yet lived here. This is very ugly, very bigoted, very divisive and a threat to families, a far worse line on citizenship than Britain's, this is not liberation or progression at all, this is an inward turned grim racist horror prospect. Step by step this dystopian appeal to narky inward focussed outsider fearing bigots is becoming too stark not to see.

Listen to your expat families. They are real people.

die of debate

According to the Sunday Herald's last front page, reckless new workfare rules for disability/sickness benefits are going to cause a lot of health damage from pushing folks into unsuitable placements they can't cope with. This comes from the British end, under whose powers the welfare system still rests. The Yes campaign will say this is a good humanitarian reason to leave Britain. Become a state where both major parties are progressive, "no more Tory governments" as had been on the SSP's Yes voting posters in Edinburgh.

But look at the independence timetable. It is actually longer than the British government's term, Salmond the reluctant seceder will take until 2016!! to actually do it. Clinging to every crumb he can on Britain's table. All this suffering will still happen while we are still waiting.

Oh but me must have a good long debate. So if folks die under pushing around by the benefits system and Atos, under 3 1/2 years of us still subject to this new system, they die to give us something to debate, do they?

in-British racism won't make a good unionist case either

Our new Lib Dem leader, Willie Rennie, was in the papers today saying Salmond might get the public all enthusiastic about new EU-supported services and thus sweep us all into voting for independence before we realise it. What is his brilliant example of why this would be terrible? That as a result, under EU rules against discrimination between its members' citizens, we would could no longer charge tuition fees to students "from" the other British countries, he would have to give them free higher education same as folks from the other EU countries already. Racial eqaulity and an improvement in the fairness of Europe as a community would be costly and terrible, he thinks. What a sodding right wing tabloid race card.

This is no way to distance perception of the Lib Dems from the coalition, is it? This is no new leadership to recover from their disaster. This is a racist form of unionism.

In particular, this is division between Scots. many of the students who live in the other British countries, who he wrongly terms "from" them, are Scots living there in exile, maybe not even willingly, a position I was once in and remember painfully. He is kicking away their participation in Scotland and a possible route for them to attain their ethnic right of zionism to come home from the diaspora.

The worst and most dangerous thing about the SNP has been its total disinterest in the diaspora and avoidance of making any issue of backing their return as a racial justice issue. If the unionist side kick the diaspora as well, and kick them worse than the SNP, where will that argument be left in the independence debate? Worse, where will the diaspora themselves be left? Inside or still outside their home? This tabloid bigoted move by the unionist side actively makes independence more attractive to the same nice thinking folks as have been disturbed by the tabloid way the SNP has been playing. Both sides want this fought at a rubbishy tabloid level, and the danger is it will come down to which side we feel worse about on the day

define Scottish students

All over the news today, the SNP's education minister Mike Russell in trouble with the EU for a policy of charging differently for going to university for Scottish and other European students. Policy of Scottish students getting it free and others charged a graduate fee. Amid the talk of discrimination, the most obvious discrimination question of all is being missed, neither the SNP nor the BBC and papers are mentioning it: what does Scottish students actually mean?

Given that there is no exact definition of Scottish. It is possible for the same person both to be Scottish and to live in, hence be "from", another EU country or another British country. How does the policy impact on them?

The policy seems designed to focus on folks who live in Scotland. By that, it is defining out of being Scottish, a historically key part of the Scottish nation: its diaspora. Adding to their pain.

In the imminent election, this should be a racism and human rights concern, that the SNP is required to answer or stand seen as wronging some of the nation they are supposed to exist to stand up for. Plenty of resident-Scottish voters have family or friends in the diaspora, or used to be diaspora ourselves and have returned home. The SNP will claims that the independence referendum was frustrated by parliament, instead of that they never held it because they expected to lose it, and they will try for more support for it so that they can hold and win it this time. This prospect should not be attractive or win anyone's support if the SNP are not playing fair to all Scots, treating them all the same re opportunities.

Some students living in, and/or "from", the countries to be affected by this policy, are in ethnic fact Scottish. Does the SNP want them to have access to their own heritage and to opportunity for zionist return? Yes or any other answer? Any other answer places the SNP as not upholding Scots being entitled to belong in their own homeland. The only way for their position not to be this, is if their answer on this is committal not noncommittal. Noncommittal evidences doing it. Only a committal position of not doing it means not doing it.